They lighted up, sheltering from the wind in the lee of a web support, to celebrate capturing a Wall Street stock swindler whose depredations had shut mills and thrown thousands out of work. The swindler had fled to a luxurious European exile on the mistaken assumption that the Van Dorn detectives’ motto—“We Never Give Up! Never!”—lost its teeth at the water’s edge. Bell and Abbott had run him to ground in a Nice casino. Locked in the Mauretania’s forward baggage room in a lion cage rented from a circus—the liner’s brig already occupied—he was headed for trial in Manhattan, guarded by a Van Dorn Protective Services operative.

Bell and Abbott, who had been best friends since fighting a legendary intercollegiate boxing match—Bell for Yale, Archie for Princeton—circled the boat deck alone. The hour was late, and the cold wind and fog had driven the Mauretania’s First, Second, and Third Class passengers to their respective staterooms, cabins, and galvanized-iron berths.

“We were discussing,” Archie said, only half in jest, “your not-so-impending marriage to Miss Marion Morgan.”

“We are married in our hearts.”

Isaac Bell’s fiancée was in the moving picture line. She had caught the last boat train from London after photographing King Edward VII’s funeral procession for Picture World News Reels. Cine-negatives from the taking machines she had stationed along the route had been immediately developed, washed, dried, and printed. Tonight—only nine hours after old “King Teddy” had been buried—five hundred and twenty feet of “topical film” was showing in the Piccadilly theaters, and the hardworking director was enjoying a hot bath in her First Class room along the Mauretania’s promenade deck.

“No one doubts the ardor of your courtship,” Archie said with a wink so suggestive it would have earned any other man a fist in the eye. “And who but the blind could fail to notice the colossal emerald on her finger that signifies your engagement? Yet friends observe that it’s been a while since you announced… cold feet?”

“Not mine,” said Bell. “Nor Marion’s,” he added hastily. “We’re both so busy we haven’t time to nail down a date.”

“Now’s your chance. Four and a half days on the high seas. She can’t escape.” Archie gestured with his cigar up at the Mauretania’s darkened bridge and asked casually, as if he and his wife had not conjured up this conversation the day they booked passage, “What do you say we ask the captain to marry you?”

“Miles ahead of you, Archie.”

“What do you mean?”

A big grin lighted Bell’s face with a row of strong, even teeth that practically flashed in the dark. “I’ve already spoken with Captain Turner.”

“We’re on!” Archie grabbed Bell’s hand and shook it vigorously. “I’m best man. Lillian’s matron of honor. And we’ve got a boatload of wedding guests. I snuck a look at the manifest. Mauretania is carrying half the ‘Four Hundred’ and a fair slice of Burke’s Peerage.”

Bell’s grin set in a determined smile. “Now all I have to do is corral Marion.”